Littered with remains of great civilizations, witness to events of the Bible, and governed by fierce Muslim warriors who kept their women secluded in harems, the Middle East has enthralled the imagination of the West since the Crusades.

In the 19th century, as the Ottoman Empire weakened, parts of the Middle East became the subject of renewed Western colonial ambitions.

Bonfils studio, Turkish Sheikh Praying, 1867 - 76. Albumen silver print 22.5 x 17.1 cm. Harvard Semitic Museum Photographic Archive, Visual Collections, Fine Arts Library.

To serve these interests, a flood of Middle Eastern imagery satu-rated Western visual and literary representation. Photography was one such medium of representation that also helped create and disseminate complex and often contradictory cultural attitudes about the region.

Featuring approximately 90 works, this exhibition explores the ways in which the medium of photography provided encounters with the landscapes, monuments, and peoples of the Middle East to a broad public during photography’s first century. Drawing its examples from the Harvard Semitic Museum Photographic Archive, other Harvard collections, and the Boston Public Library, Sight-seeing examines how images of the Middle East functioned as surrogates for travel in the region. The exhibition presents both amateur and commercial work, ranging from snapshot albums to mass-produced postcards, from panoramic prints to lantern slides. It highlights the distinctive patterns that emerged in the construction and presentation of photographs of the Middle East for Western consumption. The exhibition features typical and unusual views of the region that were produced through amateur, institutional, and commercial efforts for a range of audiences. Artistic, missionary, scholarly, commercial, and strategic military concerns were advanced through photography using a variety of presentation forms—albums, published works, stereo views, lantern slides, panoramas, postcards—that allowed photographs to function as surrogates for sight or as souvenirs of travel experience, thereby shaping attitudes about the Middle East.